You can harness social influence

ByJonah Berger,
expert on word of mouth, viral marketing and social influence

Follow these six key STEPPS, or even just a few of them, and you can harness social influence and word of mouth to get any product or idea to catch on.

Social Currency: Does talking about your product or idea make people look good? Can you find the inner remarkability? Leverage game mechanics? Make people feel like insiders?

Triggers: Consider the context. What cues make people think about your product or idea? How can you grow the habitat and make it come to mind more often?

Emotion: Focus on feelings. Does talking about your product or idea generate emotion? How can you kindle the fire?

Public: Does your product or idea advertise itself? Can people see when others are using it? If not, how can you make the private public? Can you create behav-ioral residue that sticks around even after people use it?

Practical Value: Does talking about your product or idea help people help others? How can you highlight incredible value, packag-ing your knowledge and expertise into useful information others will want to disseminate?

Stories: What is your Trojan Horse? Is your product or idea embedded in a broader narrative that people want to share? Is the story not only viral, but also valuable?

No matter what your product is, you are ultimately in the education business. Your customers need to be constantly educated about the many advantages of doing business with you, trained to use your products more effectively, and taught how to make never-ending improvement in their lives.

We know that sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than five. Easy words are better than hard words. It's a bandwidth issue: The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be. Simple = core + compact Proverbs are helpful in guiding individual decisions in environments with shared standards. Those shared standards are often ethical or moral norms. Proverbs offer rules of thumb for the behavior of individuals. The Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is so profound that it can influence a lifetime ...